Hello again!
We have some interesting items to share with you today. These items are a little bit different in the fact that they were never released to the public. In fact these were all used "during" the production of their respective game. The first thing's are from Suikoden III, they are 2 discs that were used from the production team at Konami before the game was released. They are the actual game of Suikoden III, however they are not the finished versions that were released, they have some things different. I haven't had a chance to play through them completely comparing them to the original Suikoden III game, as I just received them, but I will one day! I'll show you just some early pictures I took.
The gold one is dated 2002/07/15 and the white one is dated 08/09/02. The actual game was released on October 24th, 2002, which shows these versions are earlier betas. The gold one I tested about 10 minutes of Hugos first chapter, but I couldn't see any noticeable difference. I will have to look into it further and play more. The white disc is the more interesting one so far. Loading it up is obvious its different from the retail version, there are a lot of coding and programming on the screen, showing how the game is working. I think there is a chance there could even be some "debug" options, which means there could be cool things like adding items, changing my strength and levels, and some other cool things. That is unsure yet though. Here are some screenshots of the white disc in-game.
The other rare thing that I purchased was a demo version of Suikoden IV. It is dated November, the release of Suikoden IV in the US was January 11th, 2005. Which means this demo was released some months before it. This was a demo given to Embargo press, though i'm unsure of what that is.
There are also some noticeable differences in this demo. It is a short demo starting when you are on your ship fighting the Water Dragon, then you crash at the shore and have to fight the Crab boss to save Chiepoo. This part is very condensed compared to the original, as you don't have to go around collecting wood or spend days there. The mermaid comes to you right away and asks you to beat up the crab. It's been a while since I played Suikoden IV but in this version a random 4th character is in your party instead of Chiepoo, first I had Jeane then I had Mizuki, both as playable characters. Also all your runes are powered up 100%, with level 4 magic already available, and 9 attacks of each. Also, as the game obviously wasn't finished yet, the translation is still a little unfinished as you can see in these pics.
The last item that I got was used by Konami of Japan while making Suikoden Tierkreis. They are 72 colour pages of Suikoden character art. These were actually used in the production of Tierkreis, but I don't know much else about them other than they're so cool!! Take a look ^^
I'm not sure about the character art, but the discs are quite a rare find as they were never supposed to leave the offices of Konami. The seller told me that an employee had taken these during the production, but today there is a lot more security for things like this and it's almost impossible to get away with things like that. Besides their rarity, another reason I love them is that they give us a look into the making and history of our beloved games :) It makes me feel like I was there during the production!
I hope you enjoyed these!
Adios! ^^
